Canadians now know that Afghan security forces routinely beat Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects senseless with cudgels, pipes, wire cables and rubber hoses. They tortured teenagers. Burned suspects with cigarettes, tore out their nails and hung them from ceilings. A United Nations report last year confirmed the horrors. “Even stones confess here,” one jailer told a suspect.
Yet when a firestorm erupted in Parliament over fears that Canadian troops might be handing over detainees to torturers, threatening his minority government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper shrugged off the concerns, saying “we have no evidence that supports the allegations.” While few detainees handed over by Canada have been shown in fact to be abused, much less tortured, the danger was real. Conservative complacency was indefensible. To this day we don’t know whether Canada should have been transferring prisoners.
In the latest twist to this sorry saga the Military Police Complaints Commission has just cleared eight military police officers of any misconduct for failing to intervene in the transfers, after a four-year probe. A report released on Wednesday by Chair Glenn Stannard exonerated the police, finding they were “marginalized” and left in the dark. Other Canadian officials tried to track how detainees were treated, but didn’t share what they knew with the police.
While it’s reassuring to know that the individual officers did no wrong, the probe had harsh words for the Harper government’s dismissive attitude toward investigating whether our troops might have been complicit in war crimes.
The commission found there was “a great deal of reliable information … to document the risk of ill-treatment of detainees.” Yet even so, Ottawa adopted “an overall attitude of antipathy … towards the Commission and its task, and a general, adversarial approach.” It put up “significant obstacles” to the probe, the report found. Officials blocked interviews with witnesses, refused to expedite proceedings, would not provide documents, delayed disclosure, disputed the relevance of documents and tried to have witnesses testify in secret.
“The Commission was mindful of the existence of a potential or actual conflict of interest between the government’s duty to produce documents to the Commission on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the self-interest it might have in slowing down or inhibiting disclosure of information deemed harmful to itself,” the report said.
In other words, the Conservative government stonewalled as if it had something to hide.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: --
Yet when a firestorm erupted in Parliament over fears that Canadian troops might be handing over detainees to torturers, threatening his minority government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper shrugged off the concerns, saying “we have no evidence that supports the allegations.” While few detainees handed over by Canada have been shown in fact to be abused, much less tortured, the danger was real. Conservative complacency was indefensible. To this day we don’t know whether Canada should have been transferring prisoners.
In the latest twist to this sorry saga the Military Police Complaints Commission has just cleared eight military police officers of any misconduct for failing to intervene in the transfers, after a four-year probe. A report released on Wednesday by Chair Glenn Stannard exonerated the police, finding they were “marginalized” and left in the dark. Other Canadian officials tried to track how detainees were treated, but didn’t share what they knew with the police.
While it’s reassuring to know that the individual officers did no wrong, the probe had harsh words for the Harper government’s dismissive attitude toward investigating whether our troops might have been complicit in war crimes.
The commission found there was “a great deal of reliable information … to document the risk of ill-treatment of detainees.” Yet even so, Ottawa adopted “an overall attitude of antipathy … towards the Commission and its task, and a general, adversarial approach.” It put up “significant obstacles” to the probe, the report found. Officials blocked interviews with witnesses, refused to expedite proceedings, would not provide documents, delayed disclosure, disputed the relevance of documents and tried to have witnesses testify in secret.
“The Commission was mindful of the existence of a potential or actual conflict of interest between the government’s duty to produce documents to the Commission on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the self-interest it might have in slowing down or inhibiting disclosure of information deemed harmful to itself,” the report said.
In other words, the Conservative government stonewalled as if it had something to hide.
Source: the star
Author: --
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